What is Google Tag Manager ?

Imagine you have a big box filled with different colored blocks. Each block represents something that you want to know about people visiting your website, like how many people visit your website or what pages they look at. These blocks are called “tags.”

Google Tag Manager is like a special tool that helps you put the right blocks in the right places on your website. It makes it easy to add or take away blocks without having to change the website code.

For example, you might want to put a red block on your website to count how many people visit the page, and you might want to put a blue block to count how many people clicked on a button. With Google Tag Manager, you can easily put these blocks in the right places on your website, and then see how many people did each thing by counting the number of blocks.

Additionally, you can use it for special things that you want to know about your website, like how fast it loads or where people are from. It allows you to put special blocks that can measure this too.

The goal of using Google Tag Manager is to understand more about your website visitors, what they do and what they like, this way you can make your website better and more fun for them to use. It’s like a big puzzle that helps you understand what people are doing on your website.

What Can We Do Using Gtm?

It is possible to track user interactions on a website using just Google Analytics, without using Google Tag Manager. However, there are some benefits to using GTM in conjunction with GA:

1. GTM makes it easier to add and manage tracking tags on your website, without having to make changes to the source code. This can save time and reduce the risk of errors.
2. GTM allows you to add and manage multiple tracking tags, from different services, in one place. This can make it easier to track and analyze data from different sources.
3. GTM allows you to create custom tags and custom tracking, which can be useful if you want to track something that isn’t already available through GA.
4. GTM allows you to easily add or remove tags without needing to make any changes to the website source code, this allows for more flexibility and ease in managing tracking tags.
5. GTM provides an overview of all the tags that are installed on your website and fire on your website, and so it becomes easy to troubleshoot issues with tags, as well as verify that they are working as intended.

That being said, it is possible to track many of the same things in GA, without using GTM. However, GTM can make it easier to add and manage tracking tags, and can also give you more flexibility in terms of customizing the tracking on your website.

Benefits of using Google Tag Manager:

1. Easy to use: Google Tag Manager has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to add and manage tags, even if you’re not a developer.
2. Increases Efficiency : GTM makes it easier to manage and update tracking tags on your website or mobile app, which can help to increase the efficiency of your marketing and analytics efforts.
3. Reduce errors: By using a tool like GTM to manage tags, you can reduce the risk of errors in the implementation of tracking and measurement tags.
4. Streamline Collaboration: GTM allows for multiple users to have access and edit container, it can make collaboration and task delegation more streamlined.
5. Customizable tracking: GTM allows for custom tags and custom tracking, It gives you the flexibility to track anything you need, rather than just be limited to what a certain platform allows.
6. Version Control: GTM has built-in version control which allows you to keep track of changes and quickly rollback to a previous version if needed.
7. Easy debugging: GTM comes with a debug console which allows you to see how tags are fired on your website, this can be very useful in troubleshooting issues.
8. Cost-effective: Google Tag Manager is a free tool, which means you don’t have to pay for it. This can save you money compared to other tag management solutions.

 How Google Tag Manager might be used to track user interactions on a website:

Imagine you have a website that sells products online. You want to track how many people are viewing your product pages and how many of them are adding items to their cart. To do this, you would need to add tracking tags to your product pages, and then send that data to a service like Google Analytics.

Without Google Tag Manager, you would need to add the tracking tags manually to your website’s source code, and then update the code each time you wanted to make a change to the tracking tags. This process can be time-consuming and error-prone.

With Google Tag Manager, you can add the tracking tags through a web-based interface, without having to make changes to the source code. You can also make changes and updates to the tags quickly and easily, without needing to wait for a developer to make the updates for you.

Once you’ve added the tracking tags to GTM container, you need to install GTM container snippet on every page of your website, this allows the tags to fire and send data to Google Analytics.

Now, you can go to GA and create a report to show how many people viewed product pages and how many added items to cart. You can also use the data to create segments to see which products are more popular or which ones have higher conversion rates.

In this way, Google Tag Manager makes it easier for you to track the interactions of users on your website, and to use that data to make informed decisions about your marketing and business strategies.

How Can We Create Custom Tags

In Google Tag Manager, you can create custom tags by using the “Custom HTML” tag type. This allows you to add your own HTML, JavaScript, or other code to the tag, which can then be used to track custom events or send data to other services.

Here’s an example of how you might use a custom tag to track button clicks on your website:

1. Go to the Google Tag Manager interface and create a new tag.
2. Select “Custom HTML” as the tag type.
3. In the HTML field, you can add the code that will track the button clicks. For example, you can use jQuery to attach an event listener to the button and send an event to GA when the button is clicked.

<script>
  $('button').click(function() {
    ga('send', 'event', 'Button', 'Click', 'ButtonName');
  });
</script>

1. In the trigger section, you will need to create a trigger that will fire the tag when the button is clicked. You can create a trigger using “Click – All Elements” and configure it to fire on the button element.
2. Publish the container

In this way, you can use custom tags to track events or interactions on your website that aren’t already available through the built-in tags in GTM or GA. This can be particularly useful if you have custom features on your website or want to track events that are specific to your business.

In Google Tag Manager, keywords and phrases related to you might include:

1. Custom tracking – This refers to the ability to track events or interactions on your website that aren’t already available through the built-in tags in GTM or other analytics tools.
2. Custom variables – This refers to the ability to create custom variables in GTM, which can be used to extract data from the web page or pass data to other tags.
3. Event tracking – This refers to the ability to track specific events on your website, such as button clicks, form submissions, and more.
4. Advanced tracking – This refers to using GTM in advanced ways, such as using data layer, custom JavaScript, or using it to control the behavior of other scripts
5. Tag sequencing – This refers to the ability to specify the order in which tags should be fired on your website, which can be useful if you want certain tags to fire before or after others.
6. Custom data layer- This refers to the ability to create custom data layer variables in GTM, which can be used to pass data between tags or store information about the page and user interactions.
7. GTM debugging – This refers to the process of troubleshooting issues with your GTM tags, or verifying that they are firing and sending data as expected.

These keywords and phrases can be useful to know when researching GTM or when trying to understand how it can be used to track specific events or interactions on a website.

Keep in mind that Google Tag Manager is a very flexible tool with many possibilities, and many other keywords may exist that may be specialized to your specific business or use case, you can always look for more keywords and strategies by reading documentation, forums, and best practice articles.